


Festival of Flowers

by Eileen_R



Series: Kirk's Challenge [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alcohol, Denebia IV, Drug Use, F/M, Pre-Canon, Zinedom Archive Project, fanzine fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1978-12-01
Updated: 1978-12-01
Packaged: 2019-04-22 10:11:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14306466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eileen_R/pseuds/Eileen_R
Summary: Kirk has a festival interlude with the telepathic Amalthea, who chooses to bear his son.





	Festival of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> This is part 1 of the Kirk's Challenge Series. It was originally published in December 1978 in the fanzine "IDIC" #6 and was accompanied by a single black and white ink drawing of Captain Kirk by artist P.S. Nim. It has been posted here by the original creator. You can read more about the history of the fanzine on Fanlore [here](https://fanlore.org/wiki/IDIC_\(Star_Trek:_TOS_zine_1\)#Issue_6)
> 
>  
> 
> The remaining parts  
> "Kirk's Challenge" (published in parts the fanzine Interphase #2, 3, and 4)  
> "Sands of an Endless Shore" in Maine(ly) Trek #3, and  
> "Death's Crystal Kingdom" in Maine(ly) Trek #4.
> 
> A short story in the same universe is "A Fantasy of Alienation" in IDIC #4.

 

“You are hereby requested and required to leave your present post upon arrival at Starbase 12 and transfer aboard the Constitution class Starship U.S.S. Enterprise, there to take command ...”

“My god,” Commander James T. Kirk whispered. “My god.”

“You got it!” A whooping Gary Mitchell pounded him. “They gave you the Enterprise!”

“Why me?” Kirk asked, dazed. Four hundred and thirty people aboard a Starship, all to be under his direct command ...

“A line of medals as long as my arm ...” Gary flung out his arms for comparison, “… and he asks ‘why me’. The Axanar Peace Mission, the Grankite campaign, the Karagite battles alone -- are you kidding?! A Starship was the least they could do!”

“The Enterprise has a First. The Vulcan.”

“Maybe he didn’t want it. What’s the matter with you, Jimmy boy? This here’s cause for celebration.”

Looking around his cabin, Kirk thought vaguely that he would have to move again. There wasn’t much. The room was spartan, bare. His cabin aboard the Enterprise would be much the same.

“Hey,” Kirk interrupted something he hadn’t even heard, “come to attention when you speak to me.” Beginning weakly to grin, he added, “I’m a captain.” Pummeling each other’s backs, they laughed until they choked.

A few hours later at the helm Kirk barely heard Gary’s exultant monolog. He tended his station and thought. _The Enterprise....One_ of the newer ships. It was due for an overhaul in eight months, if he remembered the outfitting list correctly. Second generation fixtures, all the frills and feathers. He hoped they’d let him have enough of a shakedown before beginning the next five-year cruise.

Most of the crew would be new to him. More people to win over. Damn that Vulcan. Why didn't he want command? Vulcans were loyal. Kirk would have to see that that loyalty was transferred, from Pike, who was now Fleet Captain, to him ...

“He never lets up, does he?” Matt Decker said, arms akimbo in front of the helm. Kirk’s mouth relaxed as he recognized the tone.

“When you’re on a landing party, Matt, or in sickbay or asleep, would you want someone at the com who does?”

“No one’s on duty twenty-four hours a day, Jim! Listen, the Constellation is going to be in the neighborhood of Denebia IV a couple of weeks before we report for dry-docking. No, no,” he protested as Kirk opened his mouth to protest, “just errand-running, you know as well as I. But I’m going to put down landing parties for R&R and you, my conscientious First Officer, are going to be included in one of them.”

“Matt, I really don’t think -- ”

“Excellent. Continue doing just that.”

“I’ll go down with him, Cap’n! I’ll make sure he keeps his mind on pleasure.”

Turning a look and a sigh on Gary, the captain said, “How the Admiralty could assign you two to the same ship, I will never know. Do you have high placed relatives, Mitchell?”

“They couldn’t break up a team, Cap’n!”

“And I suppose I am equally enjoined?”

“Well ... I never let up, either,” Gary said with a grin.

“Somehow that isn’t exactly what I meant ...”

§§

 

Kirk signed the chit and pushed the entrance form toward the clerk. She glanced over it. “Very good, sir. Will there be any special restrictions involving sex, mood-altering or hallucinatory drugs, alcohol ...”

“He’s had command conditioning.” Gary draped an arm around Kirk’s neck. “Give him the full works!”

Kirk shook his head slightly. “It doesn’t matter. I can make my own choices.”

“And you, sir?”

“I haven’t had command conditioning. Give me the same!”

She punched the information into her console; two clicks later a pair of blue disks slid out. She handed them to the officers. “Placed behind your ear, they will guide and admit you to all blue level establishments. Welcome to Denebia IV, the pleasure planet of the galaxy ...”

In Ozma, the streets were crooked and bright. Clouds of cotton-candy dotted ceiling skies, and fountains of wine and spirits bubbled in the squares. The gravity sat lightly on Kirk’s bones. Gary clattered wildly beside him, mug waving, hand sketching, mouth open and laughing. A sideway quirk of Kirk’s lips every now and then was enough to keep him primed.

Kirk assured himself that he was enjoying this. It was pleasant stretching muscles for diversion instead of exercise. Seeing space and sky over his head, even if it was only a dome; having the colors and scents and cadences of a hundred earth-bound details within touching distance, though most of them were faked. It was...nice. Well, different, anyway. He could enjoy it. Let Gary have the loud, the boisterous, the ever-roistering side of the coin. He could stand back and ... enjoy...

Besides, it didn’t really fit into the image of a starship captain, anyway.

Unnoticed, desolate, his fingers tightened on a lamp post until the metal bit his skin.

He consciously relaxed the grip.

Gary called out to him, swinging on the opposite post. “'Try some of this, Jim. You’re not celebrating!”

“What is it?” Kirk asked, neutrally.

“I dunno! It’s green and it's wet and -- ” Scooping up one of the glasses like soap bubbles, Gary took a slug ... and promptly spit it out again. Kirk found himself laughing.

“What’s the matter? Did it bite you back?”

“Oh, lord, that stuff’s laquar! Damn Vulcan soda-pop!”

“A mild telepathic stimulant,” the voice in back of Kirk’s ear said primly. “Non-alcoholic and harmless to psi-nulls.”

“Poor baby,” Kirk teased. “Can’t keep up with the big boys?” He dipped a bubble-full, sipped it, laughing at Gary's expression of horror. It was bright-tasting, not unpleasant. He absently refilled his glass. “Come on. What’s that?” He pointed to a broader thoroughfare, with a parade of some kind visible.

“It is Spring Festival. The Dance of the Pleasure Flowers,” the voice told him. Gary supplied his own interpretation.

“Women!”

The parade -- dance -- procession -- was exquisite. The ordered rows of women, in severe, strange, silken costumes, were each holding a fan or flower or the flame of a scarf. At some unheard signal each fan would dip, each head tilt and the aspect changed like wind on wheat fields. Then again, and again. Kirk walked alongside the parade, behind the thin line of watching people, entranced. He barely noticed his friend’s defection until Gary returned to tug at his sleeve.

“Uh ... Jim ...”

Swinging around, he regarded his friend and the small red· haired woman inside the circle of his friend’s arm with a lifted brow. “Already?”

“Jim, you’re my buddy and I love you dearly, but if I see you again before we beam up it’ll be too soon. Okay?”

Kirk grinned. “Have a good time.” With a wave, they were gone. He adjusted his sleeve absently, strolling beside the parade. The two stripes of braid were stiff to the touch.

_Chains ..._

Now why had he thought that? Not chains -- emblems, of duties and responsibilities ... Ensignia marking seventeen years inside a ship of one kind or another. Kirk drained the glass of laquar, feeling just slightly light-headed. His gaze narrowed, focusing in on one particular pale flower-face. It was fragile, hidden.

Seventeen years of devotion to duty had gotten him what? A captaincy and a starship, at thirty-two years of age. And, with luck, the next sixty-eight to spend within ships of one kind or another, obeying orders or giving them, tending the future, building a reputation and an image ...

But not now. Not yet.

The parade reached some invisible finish and began to fragment, still precise, a clockwork braid unwinding. Kirk kept his gaze on his flower-face, pacing her as her companions dropped off. Pretty -- blonde, delicate. She knew he was there. Her eyes flicked back once, playful, smiling. The voice in the back of his ear said something. He didn't really hear what, except that it was not negative.

Beginning to smile, he lengthened his stride to catch up. They were in a private quarter now, medieval arches. small streets and filigree gates. The Vulcan wine was in his head and she was almost there. Half-running, he caught at her hand and they laughed in each other’s eyes. Still laughing, lifting her hair away from her face, he walked into a sweet-scented mist, and he never came out.

 

§§

 

He had command conditioning. He could not be drugged or coerced into behavior against his will. The silent locks in his brain would snap shut and he would not be much good for anything until they opened. He was artificially immune to most of the dangerous drugs, knew how to deal with others. But Denebia IV did not carry quite the usual line, and laquar was perhaps not quite as harmless to him as he had been told. He never remembered most of the interlude. Nor did he want to.

There were: afternoons walking in the sunshine, filtering past screens and sill and the tinkle of alien music as she played for him; mornings when they ran and laughed together like children; nights filled with the perfume of her hair ...

He looked up once to see tears, slow and silver, tracing down her cheeks. He reached out to draw her near, soothe, protect. “Don’t cry, love.” Her face could break with a second’s more unhappiness. She was a frond, bending in the wind. “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of you ...”

She shook her head, pressed to his shoulder. “You can’t. I know my death.” She held onto him, sobbed once. “But not alone!” He held her, hand soothing back her hair, until she was quiet.

“I love you....”

Lying on the sleeping mat, eyes closed, breezes and her hands stroking him, and she crooning, “... from you -- Oh, my captain, my Jim, a son from you ...” He never remembered that.

Sitting at a low table, with tea and a picnic lunch spread out in front of them, and she asking, “... no seed?”

“Of course not. Starfleet can’t have its officers leaving byblows on every humanoid world we visit. There’s a chemical block -- ” he gestured vaguely, “in the tubes ...”

“Where? Here?” She placed her hand on his lower abdomen.

There was a pull, somewhere, deep inside him.

“That feels funny.”

“Shhh. I’ll put it back later, I promise ...” He never remembered that, either.

A whole bottle of laquar and his head starting to spin, the universe expanding around him. It was too much, the knowing too much. His flower-face, her happiness such a thin veil. The voices from the street and the bars half a kilometer away battering his ears. Gary...Gary was jealous. Gary hated the thought that Kirk was a captain while Gary’s own Commander bars were still new.

 _No! Gary_ was _his friend. Gary wouldn’t ..._

Gary was ambitious. He was Fourth on the Constellation, would be First on the Enterprise, with his good buddy Jim helping him up the ladder. It would be enough ... for a while ...

Hands to his head, he moaned. “Take it away. It hurts...” Her footsteps hurrying, alarmed.

“It shouldn’t. I’ll get the... Drink this.” Something smelled of fish. He pushed it away.

“Jim, let me help.”

“You can’t.”

He remembered some of that, later. It was just as well. He would need it.

And once, quickly, caught in silver and wild desperation: “Love me, love me now, for I have no tomorrows.”

Gary shook him awake the next morning, in the empty room and the deserted house. “Come on, Jim. We're gonna be late! Boy, what a leave. I haven't been near so many women since the day I crashed the harem. How’d you do, buddy?”

Kirk mumbled something, turning to look at the house as they left. He didn’t recognize it. His head felt like the butt end of an ashcan and he couldn’t remember anything. What ... had happened? What had he done ...?

He was an officer and a gentleman, a respected member of Starfleet, soon to take up his position as the newest captain of the line.

Nothing had happened here. Nothing.

Eyes forward, he walked beside his friend to the beam-up point, the familiar duties waiting for him. His hand had been clenched tight around something as he woke. Realizing it the moment before beam-up, he opened his hand to look.

It was a flower, the kind that bloomed for only one day... It was already dead.

Face expressionless, Kirk let it fall.

 

✮✮✮

 


End file.
